Reflections on a Road Less Traveled: Alt-Ac Archaeology Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa FINAL DRAFT, September 2015 To be published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Fall 2015 issue on the theme “Alternative Academic Careers and 21 st Century Scholarship” In 2003, with recent Ph.D.s in Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology in hand, we did something risky. We decided to step off the traditional academic career path and pave a new road. This approach, which has since become known as an “alt-ac” (alternative academic) career, is gaining many followers, particularly in the face of the increasing corporatization of the university, which has cast much doubt on the future of traditional academic career paths. Our story is not unusual. Everyone knows that it is very difficult to find a job in archaeology. It’s even harder to find two jobs in one place. We were at an age where we were willing to take some risks, and we had an idea. As recent graduate students, we had both collected original data from our own analyses, and transcribed data from the published literature. Rather than see this as a rite of passage that all graduate students should go through, why not speed discovery and multiply the impact of that work by using the Web to share that effort? As we discussed this, driving along California Interstate 580 one afternoon in the year 2000, the Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI) was born. In the fifteen years since then, the AAI and Open Context, have emerged as leading players as 21 st century archaeological scholarship goes online. Open Context is an open access data publishing platform for archaeology, which is now referenced by NSF and NEH for data management for archaeology and the digital humanities. Its approach of “data sharing as publishing” emphasizes collaboration with dedicated editorial and information specialists (us) to make data more intelligible and usable. Open Context publishes a wide variety of archaeological data, ranging from archaeological survey data to excavation documentation, artifact analyses, chemical analyses of artifacts, and detailed descriptions of bones and other biological remains found in archaeological contexts. The range, scale, and diversity of these data require expertise in data modeling and a commitment to continual development and iterative problem solving. Open Context has undergone several upgrades, the most recent in spring of 2015, to keep pace with technology changes and to leverage best practices in data stewardship. With data preservation through the University of California (the California Digital Library), Open Context now publishes more than a 1.2 million archaeological records from projects worldwide. This is on a scale comparable to that of a major museum (for instance, the online collection of the Metropolitan Museum of New York makes some 407,000 records available). Open Context has made this remarkable achievement on a much more limited budget than the online collections of major museums. Grant funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the NEH, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, NSF, and others has gone a long way largely because of the AAI’s status as an independent non-profit organization with an overhead much, much lower than large research institutions. The AAI and Open Context have also benefited from the growth of the Web and the